To make Comments write directly to Jim at jimt@quixotic.ca
29
Mar
2022
Thursday February 24, 2022
I took my bicycle for a ride along the Mission Creek Greenway in Kelowna, not long ago. I didn’t bother checking a map –why bother? The creek runs down to the lake; the Greenway follows the creek; what could go wrong?
Except that the trail I was riding along abruptly ended at a wire fence.
Clearly, the main trail had diverged somewhere, but I was so preoccupied with my own ride that I didn’t notice. It must be somewhere to my left. And fortunately, there was a trail of sorts leading that direction.
The trail was rough, but passable. Until I got to a little stream, seeping down through millennia of rotting vegetation, just too wide to leap across.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: God, Job, bicycle, Satan
Thursday February 17, 2022
From my office chair, I can look up and see a an eight-foot shelf filled with books I helped to publish. I recognize every title. I know every author. I remember delving into every subject.
I had a hand – or at least a pencil – in every one of those books.
And then, abruptly, the authors, the subjects, the textual content, are all strangers. They’re still good books. Still worth reading. But they’re not mine anymore.
In serious discussions of faith and doctrine, a friend frequently ventures something like: “I’m not sure that I know what I’m talking about, but isn’t this all about ego somehow?”
Yes it is. It’s almost always about ego.
Tags: God, books, ego
12
The “Golden Guys” meet on Mondays. Mostly, we talk about what it feels like to grow older. On a recent Zoom call, we talked about how our lives have changed. There were six of us:
· One university professor, no longer teaching any students.
· One high-school principal, no longer administering anything.
· One orchardist, no longer tending trees.
· One business executive, no longer running any business.
· One minister, no longer offering leadership in any kind of pastorate.
· And me, the only one of us still doing what I had done most of my life – writing – although at a significantly reduced level.
Tags: God, Moses, Exodus, YHWH, Yahweh, names
28
Dec
2021
Thursday December 23, 2021
I call myself a Christian (though I’m sure some would consider me a humanist at best, an atheist at worst). Certainly, I come from a Christian tradition. And Christian tradition has asserted, for centuries, that God was born as a human baby. We call him Jesus. Other cultures call him Jesu, or Yeshua, or some name that I don’t know.
Think about the sheer audacity of that claim. God became human! God didn’t just pretend to become human. God didn’t put on a human mask and go around in disguise. God became a human. A very specific historical human.
The Incarnation makes my faith much simpler. If I want to know what God is like, I need only look at Jesus.
Tags: God, Christmas, Jesus, Incarnation
Feb
At the start of winter, I filled my bird feeder with sunflower seeds. For several days, not one bird came to dinner. Then a single junco arrived, pecked, and flew away. The day after that, a handful of scrappy little finches showed up.
The third day, a single quail appeared.
Now, quail are ground birds. They’d rather run than fly, little legs blurring beneath them like the cartoon Roadrunner’s. And they are not loners. They travel in flocks, so many that sometimes the earth itself seems to be moving.
But for some reason, this one flew up to check. Alone.
And the next day, dozens of quail swarmed over the feeder, climbing over each other, double-deckering on each other’s backs, to get at the treasure trove of sunflower seeds.
They had to have had a way of passing the good news around.
Their own social media?
Tags: God, Language, birds, experience, prairie dogs